


PISCES

by Ryenan



Series: Star Signs [2]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Magical Stiles Stilinski, Temporary Character Death, return from the dead
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-08
Updated: 2017-11-08
Packaged: 2019-01-31 01:09:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,408
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12665199
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ryenan/pseuds/Ryenan
Summary: He dies, and then he lives. Again and again and again.





	PISCES

**Author's Note:**

> The aftermath of your life affords you three real options: obscurity, legend, or horror story.

“Bedtime story?”

The young mother checks her watch as a show, already settling in beside her daughter on the narrow bed.

“Alright,” She says, dark hair falling forward to tickle the nose of the young girl, “But just one. How about – “

“Red riding hood. Please?”

It’s the only story she ever asks for, and the only one her mother ever tells.  As she gets older, the bedtime story will turn into family history, with fewer soft words and kind deeds.

Red riding hood was kind, when he could be, and soft, when he need to be, but there’s a lot more to his story.

“Red riding hood. Once, there was a young boy, who lived among the wolves. He was human, and fragile, but carried in him a great power….”

 

#

 

Stiles slams the bat down again and again, hands numb save for the sting of opened blisters. Rowan is a brittle, flaky wood, and all attempts to sand or wax it smooth just made more splinters to rip apart his hands.

The Wendigo is well and truly dead, has been for several minutes, but Stiles can’t seem to stop. It nearly tore Erica’s arm off, and took a huge, ugly chunk out of Scott’s leg that’s still bleeding. He wants it gone – not just dead, but really gone, completely erased. So he brings the bat down again and again and again.

“Stiles!”

He loosens his grip and looks up from his self-imposed task, resting the stained rowan on what’s left of the creature’s chest.

“Stiles, let Jordan take it. Are you okay?” Lydia is the only one who calls Parrish Jordan, but as he looks around, he can’t find her in the hazy black mist.

“Stiles?”

 

#

 

He wakes in his own bed, stripped of his bloodied clothes but still flecked in mud, sweat, and blood. It’s dark outside, hours if not days after the fight, and he’s ravenous, thirsty, and slimy in equal measure. Slowly he sits up, head spinning and skin tight against his temples, but doesn’t swing his feet to the floor.

He can’t move his ankles more than a few inches in any direction, and when he flips back the covers it’s apparent why.

Someone has chained him to his own bed.

As fine as he was before, they now are uncomfortable, awkward, pulling on his legs and twisting his ankles, and Panic wells up in his throat.

“Dad! Dad!”

It’s Parrish, Scott, and Lydia who respond to his anguished cries, and Scott does his best to sooth him while the other two just hover nervously.

“Stiles, Stiles, it’s ok, we just wanted to keep you safe, your dad – “

“What did you do? What did you do to me?”

 

#

 

When he blacked out three days ago, Stiles learns, he fell and gutted himself on his own spiked bat. It caught his kidney, his intestines, his aorta. He was bleeding like a fountain out in the middle of the woods, much too far from a hospital, so Scott bit him.

And then he hadn’t woken up for three days. His wound had healed, and there was no black blood, just…unconsciousness. They had worried that he would wake in the night and flee, or attack his father, so they had chained him down. He was a wolf now, and –

Stiles cuts Scott off at that point.

“I’m not a wolf.”

“I know this isn’t what you wanted, but you’re alive, which is – “

“Dude. I’m not a wolf. Can someone get me a glass of water here?”

 

#

 

Scott watches him closely for weeks, even insists on chaining him up for the full moon.

But nothing happens.

“I’ve been telling you, for weeks, I’m fine. Not a wolf. I just, I don’t know, absorbed it or something. I’m magic, remember?”

They go all night with Stiles chained to a tree out in the preserve, playing scrabble on the forest floor by moonlight.

Scott can barely believe it.

“You healed, and, and, “

“And, other than that, I have no wolfy traits. No claws, fangs, flashy eyes, super strength, any of it. It’s just a fluke, I guess. Maybe I’m the true human to match your true alpha.”

 

#

 

A few years later, when the incident is pushed to the back of their minds, A vampire drains and feeds Stiles.

He wakes up with pink cheeks and brown, not red, eyes; no fangs to speak of. 

A water witch drowns him, and all he gets for her trouble is an ear infection.

He goes through his windshield, hits the hood, and straight down into the ravine, and wakes in a puddle of blood too large to spell anything but death. He doesn’t tell Scott about that time, or the next, when he earns the ire of a witch in the form of poisoned tea.

His sixth death is in front of – because of – Scott, so there’s no hiding it. His legs are a little weak, a little numb for a few days from the silver bullet that went through his spine, but he counts his blessings he doesn’t have a migraine from the one that went through his head. Lydia didn’t let Scott tell the Sheriff, thankfully, because she didn’t scream for him.

“Maybe I’m like a cat, with nine lives. That would be why the bite didn’t take.”

“Or the vampire, and you survived the witch. Woah.”

“How many lives would you say you have left then, Stiles?” Lydia is slowly flipping through the Argent bestiary, not quite willing to look at him. She says he makes her ears ring, so soon after his return from death.

“Two, maybe three? My mom, I don’t know. She tried to hurt me a few times, but I was so young, I can’t remember much.”

 

#

 

Stiles dies, and comes back again, eleven times before his twenty first birthday. It becomes a reflex, sacrificing himself to save another member of the pack. The wolves might heal, but they can still die. Death just isn’t permanent for him.

 Scott turns thirty, Stiles dies for his twenty fifth time, and Lydia points out how young he looks.

Lydia wins her Fields metal at thirty-six, When Stiles’ death count is at just twenty-eight, and won’t take him to the ceremony because he looks fifteen years her junior, at least.

Adelaide, Scott and Alison’s beautiful daughter, starts first grade a few weeks before Stiles’ death count hits fifty at the hands of a malicious, and confused, rogue hunter. Stiles misses picking her up from school for a few weeks, and she’s quite upset.

 

#

 

Stiles turns forty-five still getting carded. Beacon Hills is a lot calmer now, quitter, and he hasn’t died in years. He misses it.

Stiles travels, a young face with old eyes, and talks and learns and trades. The witches mistrust him, the wolves respect him, and the creatures in the city, separated from the wild, think he’s a joke. But they all know him and his red jacket, him and his bat, him and his sacrifice.

He arrives somewhere new only to find the red carpet of whispered secrets and exaggerated half-truths already rolled out for him.

“You’re a legend, dude.”

“I thought you couldn’t be a legend till you died, kid.”

“Kid? I’m twenty-seven!”

“And I’m nearly sixty-three.”

 

#

 

“Red riding hood came home at last, after making friends all over the world, only to find that his friends were gone,” the mother says. “They got hurt, or sick, or old, and didn’t wake back up like red riding hood always did. So he stayed, to protect the town and his friends’ children.”

“Where is he now, mama?”

“He lives in a big house in the woods, surrounded by trees and wolves and sunshine. And he teaches the wolves, protects them, even the ones that come from far away that he doesn’t know.”

“Can we visit him?”

“Not tonight. But he’ll be at your birthday next weekend, okay?”

“I love you, mama.”

“I love you too, Alison.”

She chose her great-grandmother’s name for her baby girl, not knowing how much it would make him cry. It was easy to forget his age, his smooth skin and thin frame belying his years. He was a ghost in a young man’s body, a legend and a campfire horror story, his true self fading into obscurity along with the memory of his original pack. Generations passed, and he stayed the same.

What did he do to deserve it?


End file.
